Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Integrated circuits (ICs) are made by a process that includes a design step and a subsequent fabrication step. During the design step, a layout of an IC is generated as an electronic file. The layout includes geometric shapes corresponding to structures to be fabricated on-chip. During the fabrication step, the layout is formed onto a semiconductor workpiece, for example, by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
As the semiconductor industry has progressed into nanometer technology process nodes, such as 5 nm nodes, in pursuit of higher device density, higher performance, and lower costs. The ever-shrinking geometry size brings challenges to IC fabrication. There is a need to improve efficiency and reduce cost for various semiconductor processing steps, such as for printing verification after optical proximity correction (OPC).